The scribes have only described the medallion — “an angel of peace destroying the spirit of war.”
I should have liked to have been treated to a photograph, for I do wonder how the “angel of peace” and the “spirit of war” look drawn, engraved, or stamped on that most precious of political keepsakes that is now an object of interest worldwide.
“As is tradition with heads of State or of government, Francis presented presented a gift to the Palestinian leader, commenting: “May the angel of peace destroy the evil spirit of war. I thought of you: may you be an angel of peace.” Pope Francis had called Abu Mazen a “man of peace” when he visited Bethlehem in May 2014, just as he called the then Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, a “man of peace” during his subsequent visit to Jerusalem.”
The problem: the pope did not call Abbas — aka the terrorist Abu Mazen — an “angel of peace.”
He did utter the words “angel of peace,” and he suggested that Abbas could or might be one. In the context of the pope’s complete statement about the meeting, the implication was that Abbas could be an angel of peace if he resumed direct negotiations with Israel.
It was left to one of the wounded to drive the pink community bus full of the dead and dying to the nearest hospital.
Ismaelis are an international community of Muslims who, like other Shia, revere the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali but also the Imam Ismaeli, and believe in a more allegorical, mystical interpretation of the Koran.
Muslims of all sects benefit from the philanthropy of their spiritual leader, the Aga Khan, whose charitable foundations finance schools, hospitals and the revival of classical Islamic culture and architecture throughout the Muslim world.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/14/opinions/moghul-bus-attack-pakistan/ – “Pakistan at turning point on terror?” — “Extremists have a modus operandi: They destroy any and every evidence of pluralism, tolerance, and openness — which is why they focus on minorities, history, and scholarship, saving a special ire for Muslims who disagree. In Karachi, they targeted a group of Muslims — Ismaili Shia — who played a critical role in Pakistan’s formation. Don’t think that wasn’t deliberate.” (Op-ed by Haroon Mohgul).
Two days ago:
Pakistani police say they have arrested 145 people over an attack on a bus carrying Ismaili Shia Muslims that killed at least 45 in Karachi.
Those arrested are thought to include 90 students from a madrassa, or religious school.
With reference to Geo’s non-reporting reportage: Huh?
Today:
The terrorists did not attack and fire randomly. They put in single bullets to the head — a hallmark of executions — as if the murder was in response to a conviction, a crime. And these enemies of the state made it clear that in their eyes our Ismaili brethren, among others, are guilty by virtue of their faith.
Waqqas Mir, a lawyer, goes on in his condensed and lucid opinion to note the following:
No number of laws could have saved those 43 Pakistanis who died on that bus. No number of military courts will deter such murderous violence. But effective state action, driven by the political will to counter religious bigotry at its inception could have gone a long way. Groups like the ISIS and their partners are out to destroy our states as they exist. And the state must overcome its shortcomings. Religion is a constantly available sledgehammer that everyone can use in this country. Despite repeated failure, the state has been apologetic about coming up with a pluralist discourse. It is high time that this changes.
Pakistan is a country of ghosts. They are everywhere, the victims and the perpetrators both. On Wednesday morning, six gunmen wearing police uniforms stopped an Al Azhar Garden bus carrying 60 Ismaili Muslims in Karachi. The bus picked up Ismailies from the housing society dedicated to their community on the outskirts of the city and drove them to work. It was a journey the passengers made every day.
The gunmen boarded the bus. Sub ko mar dalo, one of them is reported to have said. Kill them all. By the time the gunmen got back on their motorcycles and fled, they had murdered 43 people.
The Iranian regime is known for its intolerance of anti-regime sentiment of any kind, and its anti-riot tactics include shutting off the Internet, wireless services and other means of communication in addition to banning reporters from the area. This means the Iranian Kurdish “revolution” has not yet been televised, but much like the uprisings in Syria and Egypt, it is being broadcasted on social media.
As jihadi recruitment has grown even more severe, I believe it is because we have failed to factor in early childhood development. This is where the prologue to violence begins including radicalization and recruitment later on . . . .
While a lot of money is being thrown at “de-radicalization,” reminiscent of the War on Poverty (and just think of where that has gotten us), we owe it to the public and to ourselves not to be terrified to address childrearing practices in these homes. They are different than in the West. Nevertheless, the Western converts who radicalized share a similar background of shame and troubled early childhoods.
The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing
Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche
Readers may finding themselves swimming in Kobrin’s sprawling style but with brights applied to sifting thematically while doing so will also develop insight into the building blocks of the “exploding iceberg”, i.e., enraged terrorist cool in personality.
Only once, I believe, has BackChannels addressed the formation of a psychologically teleological path from out of a simple childhood experience (with language): Guilt and Jealousy in Two Lines (September 26, 2013).
Generally speaking, children don’t — because they cannot frame their own case — write dissertations, and adults addressing adult displays of violence approach the same with the combines of hardware and legal tools known to military and paramilitary missions.
Message: quell it first; unravel the motivation afterward.
Posted to YouTube 2/7/2007 (views: about two million).
The mother has tremendous impact on a baby. These are women often isolated from the larger society. I always asked the prisoners about their mothers. Often their eyes would well up because they knew that I knew that they were Mama’s Boys, bullies. Yet these mothers should not be blamed because in a shame honor culture the female is at the eye of the storm. She is THE shock absorber of chronic emasculated male rage. If we do not deal with early childhood development, we will lose this war on radicalization.
Raising a child happens behind closed doors. Neighbors always say about the jihadi that he was such a nice boy without knowing what really went on. To air one’s dirty laundry in public is shaming for a clan culture. Nonetheless childhood development must be factored into a cohesive plan for “de-radicalization” if we want to foil the numerous ticking human bombs.
While cultural and ethnolinguistic self-invention and experience correspond to the exigencies of living in some place with some people — really: about 7,000 living languages wrap the earth in its humanly conscious expression and reflection — the strength of combined analytical, creative, empathic, and scientific effort in the conflict and crime arenas resides in the promise of the universal applicability of hard won insight, for we are natural observers of ourselves, individually and communally, and, in some part, healers as well.
The crime that is theft — including the theft of life itself — needs no introduction anywhere on earth, but that which programs the criminal and scripts the crime — what gets into a really nasty “piece of work” — begs a good looking over life’s earliest formative experiences, and it needs that examination in a way that produced universally accessible and understood insight. Kobrin, who in her works shares her own recollections of torment in this regard, lays out what might be called — so I may call it — “the terrorist’s tableaux”: despite the scatter in the writing, one finds in her explications about “exploding icebergs” and “maternal cameos” coherent narratives about the formation of criminal bullying and terrorizing behavior.
The oldest brother of the Toulouse scooter killer, Mohamed Merah, denounces the role of his own father, mother, sister and brother in spawning a “monster” in his new book.
Abdelghani Merah, 36, says the youngest of his four siblings was raised in an “atmosphere of racism and hatred” but also of violence and neglect. He has written the book – “Mon Frère, ce terroriste” (My brother the terrorist) – to try to counter the hero-worship of Mohamed, 23, among some young French Muslims. “I am the killer’s brother but I am on the side of his victims,” he says.
Tsarni told reporters assembled on his leafy street that day he had not seen his brother’s brood for years. “I wanted my family away from his family,” he said. It’s not hard to understand why he would distance himself from the two young men accused of engineering that murderous blast, but he insists the whole family is trouble—from welfare scams to bomb threats to jihad—and it all stems from their mother, who fled the United States and now lives in Dagestan.
Back on the phone, still thinking about his brother’s family, he apologizes for his outburst of profanity, and then launches into yet another condemnation of his sister-in-law. “That woman—she created evil spawn. Evil spawn from an evil woman.”
Appearing on the cover in which the above piece lives in the magnetosphere: “Twisted Sisters: As Dzhokhar Tsarnaev awaits trial for his alleged role in the Boston Marathon Bombing, many of the women in his life are still proclaiming his innocence . . . and pushing for jihad.”
Terrorism centers on the inability to mourn loss. It becomes obsessive about the inability to process the concept of death and dying— the persistent denial of death. Terrorists deny death and even claim to love it. In reality they are terrified and taunt death like bungee jumpers who taunt heights because they cannot accept their terror, their vulnerability, and their own mortality. The suicide bomber is the terrorists’ death-anxiety emollient. It is a bizarre kind of counterphobic activity. Terrorism becomes the celebration of death. Terrorists communicate their obsession with death to their children through peculiar rituals. Think of Hamas and Hizbollah and their death parades, dressing children in suicide bomber uniforms. Or selling little doll suicide bombers as toys, making the bizarre practice of killing off one’s own acceptable. Or consider the thousands of plastic keys that the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered from Taiwan to be placed around the necks of Iranian children who went to their death as human mine sweepers during the Iran– Iraq War. The “nice” Ayatollah slaughtered these innocents while telling them and their impotent, terrorized parents that this plastic key guaranteed their entry into paradise. The terrors of the terrorist’s “inner child” are literally and concretely projected into their own children. Terrorists feel dead and want others to feel what they feel. But they cannot put their feelings into words. In the world of terrorism everything is the opposite of what it should be.
Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt (2013-11-12). Penetrating The Terrorist Psyche (Kindle Locations 482-493). Multieducator Inc. Kindle Edition.
Modern law enforcement may address terrorism as a physical process (e.g., sometimes involving “bombs on two legs”) and try to get in the way of it or forestall an act close to or at its commission.
The detachment, as it were, of contemporary psychoanalytic forces may delve back much, much farther into the beliefs and habits of cultures and families, what may be imparted through the infant’s period of language uptake, how children respond to abuse by way of the formation of “grammatical” or rule-based behaviors , and the ready political systems for culture-wide programming, intake, and operations that one finds with such as Hamas and Hezbollah. In those forces, which I presume always around (or we wouldn’t have “Officer Krupke” and its inverted psychobabble for entertainment) and always new, Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin has produced the voice of the damaged and injured by terrorism in the family — the exercise of sadistic will in the realm of the intimate — and welled that out into the portion of the human experience now embroiled in related conflicts and the singular and senseless tragedies that come of political terrorism and its inversions.
The incident began with the Iranians ordering the ship into Iranian waters. When the ships master refused, the Iranians began to fire in a way to try to disable the ship, not just as warning shots, the U.S. official said.
Several shots hit the cargo ship, but did not disable it. The ship went into UAE waters and the Iranians followed it into those territorial waters, continuing to fire, before breaking off.
A senior Iranian military official warned that any effort to board a Yemen-bound ship – supposedly filled with aid supplies – would “spark a fire,” amid speculation that Tehran is using the shipment to try to provoke an incident.
One U.S. official told Fox News the Iranian ship has media aboard.
“Iran is begging for us to board the ship. This is all for show,” he said.
From the same piece: “”I bluntly declare that the self-restraint of Islamic Republic of Iran is not limitless,” Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff, told Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam state TV late Tuesday.”
There should be no question about the defects in personality involved in Iranian belligerence and its version of military and political reality testing in service to extraordinary kleptocracy and political manipulation in turn associated with an equally ambitious and piratical expansionism.
Connect the dots:
a little elbowing at sea;
some war by proxy in Yemen to rub away the buffer and mess around with the margin of Saudi power;
add the demonstration of callousness and ruthlessness associated with the Syrian tragedy (shaped by Putin-Assad-Khamenei to produce a polarized “Assad vs The Terrorists” image diverting the initial and popular 2011 push for the reform of the Assad regime).
The Ayatollah appears incapable of restraint except when confronted with the prospect of main force — and the smaller parts of “main force” — “diplomacy”, sanctions, excoriations — appear of little concern given the regime’s comfortability with its criminality, limitless ambitions, and largely unimpeded operating style.
In reacting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in early 2014, the US government did not call the Sixth Fleet into action; it did not ban all exports to Russia; it did not stop all cultural and educational exchanges. Rather, key elites close to “a senior Russian government official”—President Vladimir Putin—were targeted with asset seizures and visa bans.
Probably the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War, and the White House targets individuals? It seemed an odd response to some observers. But it made sense. At last, after 14 years of dealing with Putin as a legitimate head of state, the US government has finally acknowledged that he has built a system based on massive predation on a level not seen in Russia since the czars. Transparency International estimates the annual cost of bribery in Russia at $300 billion, roughly equal to the entire gross domestic product of Denmark, or many times higher than the Russian budgetary allocations for health and education. Capital flight totaled $335 billion from 2005 to 2013, or about 5 percent of GDP. But then in 2014, with the ruble and oil prices tumbling, it reached more than $150 billion—a figure that has swollen Western bank coffers but made Russia the most unequal of all economies, in which, according to Credit Suisse, 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the country’s wealth.
There’s now plenty of BackChannels opinion on “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a clever collection of books (in the “The Russian Section” of the library), but no prescriptions and not much hope for those in the Russian oppositions being ground away or controlled for irrelevance by the “Vertical of Power”. The states of affairs may be ascertained swiftly with a glance at the web sites of well known critics.
Let BackChannels know when the outlook of each brightens.
The report, titled Putin. War, asserts that at least 150 Russian military personnel were killed during a Ukrainian offensive in August 2014. A further 70 — including 17 paratroopers from the city of Ivanovo — were reportedly killed during fighting near the bitterly contested town of Debaltseve in January and February.
Families of those killed in 2014 were given 2 million rubles ($39,000) by the government in exchange for signing a promise not to discuss the matter publicly, the report claims.
The great forces today are not in the “masses” or the “voting public” but in the construction and intentions of “adventurous governments” and otherwise integrated and stable ones. Among the “adventurous”: Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Orban, Erdogan, among others; “integrated and stable”: the classically liberal democracies of the world. The figure of “Everyman” shrugs before, sometimes beneath, these altogether large forces.
Ben-Yishai reported that since the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) first arranged for the transfer of injured Syrians almost two years ago, some 1,600 Syrians have been treated in Israel. Now that UNDOF has fled its postings after frequent attacks, Israel relies on “trusted intermediaries.”
BackChannels 
